What Does Donna Lee Mean? - Institutionen för musikvetenskap ...

Introduction
There is hardly any doubt that Jaco Pastorius, the self-titled debut album by a young 25 year-
old bassist from Florida published in 1976, is a masterpiece. One might like the album or not:
while some might appreciate the fact that it explores a wide variety of genres, some might
prefer to see it as an exercise in stylistic dilettantism lacking uniformity. The same goes for
Jaco’s playing: one can hear it as unbearable melodic incontinence while another might judge
it as the most unsurpassed beauty in terms of bass playing.
But qualifying Jaco Pastorius of masterpiece doesn’t leave much room for argument.
It is not based on a personal value judgement but on actual facts. I am not referring here to the
usual denotation of ”any outstanding, superlative piece of work by a creative artist” but to its
original meaning: in the old European guild system, the aspyring journeyman was expected to
create a piece of handicraft of the highest quality in order to reach the status of ”master”. One
was then oficially allowed to join the guild and to take pupils under tutelage.
After the publication of his debut album, Jaco jumped from anonimity to jazz stardom,
earning admiration both from the average musically uneducated concert-goer to the hippest
jazz cat, becoming the undisputed master of the electric bass, followed by an ever growing
number of adept students that, still today, study his solos, licks, compositions and
arrangements and try to mimic his playing style, sound and, some, subdued by his aura of
untamed charisma, even ideology and lifestyle. Ever since then, Jaco burned like a shooting
star in a meteoric career that was truncated by his untimely and tragic death in 1987.
The first track of Jaco Pastorius, a rendition of Charlie Parker’s classic tune Donna
Lee with the conga player Don Alias as the only accompanist, is today considered as the
quintessential bass players’ manifesto. As Alias himself puts it, ” every bass player I know
now can cut ’Donna Lee’ thanks to Jaco” (Milkowski 1984:62). Even a musical figure of
unquestionable stature as the ex-enfant terrible of jazz guitar Pat Metheny professes his
admiration: ”(Jaco’s) solo on ’Donna Lee’, beyond being astounding for just the fact that it
was played with a horn-like phrasing that was previously unknown to the bass guitar, is even
more notable for being one of the freshest looks at how to play on a well traveled set of chord
changes in recent jazz history – not to mention that it’s just about the the hippest start to a
debut album in the history of recorded music. That solo […] reveal(s) a melodic ingenuity
(that rarest and hardest to quantify of musical qualities amongst improvisors) that comes
along only a few times in each generation and then there is just his basic relationship to sound
and touch; refined to a degree that some would have thought impossible on an electric
instrument” (Metheny 2000).
Despite Metheny’s known penchant for affective hiperbolae, this view of the
greatness of Jaco and his Donna Lee is unanimously shared by many people. But just not
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